242 WILD SPORTS OF BURMA AND ASSAM 



should make no difference to the efficacy of his charms. This 

 the monks, several of them having in the meantime arrived on 

 the scene, agreed to. I took up my stand at the required dis- 

 tance and succeeded, much to their disgust, in sending a hole 

 through the centre of the handkerchief. A dissatisfied murmur 

 from the onlookers, and the speedy disappearance of the priests 

 into their monastery, was the result. The priests afterwards 

 informed me that their charms had been rendered useless by 

 the fact that the fabric was of English manufacture instead of 

 Burmese. Taking their good and bad qualities together we 

 conclude that the Burmese are all round to be preferred to 

 the ordinary native of India. 



As a companion in the jungle, whilst camping out under 

 canvas with them after game as I have often done for 

 a couple of months at a time, I have always found them 

 most agreeable, entertaining, and adepts in the art of 

 spinning out many a long yarn, truthful or otherwise, as 

 to how such and such a dacoit "bo," or leader, they knew 

 was sword or bullet-proof, or how such and such an elephant 

 which they had come across in a certain range of hills had to 

 ascend them backwards, owing to its tusks being too long to 

 allow of its walking up them in the usual manner. (This 

 yarn is current in every part of Burma visited by me. F. T. P.) 

 Hair-breadth escapes from tigers, ghost tales, and gruesome 

 stories of dacoity and murder often form part of these after- 

 dinner yarns, told " far from the madding crowd," in the open, 

 before a roaring camp fire, with only the stars and the moon 

 shining above us. He is a good shikarie, an indefatigable 

 walker when he chooses, and an all-round inveterate gambler, 

 and the mains of buffalo and cock-fights and boat-racing in 

 which he revels have none of the brutalities which distinguish 

 these sports in other countries. He is also very often, I am 

 sorry to have to relate, addicted to the vice of smoking and 

 eating opium, a habit which, when once it has obtained a firm 

 hold of its victim, invariably leads him on to mental and physical 

 destruction. Buddhism forbids the use of opium as one of the 

 five deadly sins. There has been a good deal written for and 

 against opium by well-meaning people, who perhaps have not 

 had an opportunity of studying its good or evil effects upon 



